AAA sees savings, service improvement with call recording |
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By Jeremy Nedelka
19 Jun 2007 | Peppers & Rogers Group, special to SearchCRM.com |
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This call may be recorded for quality assurance. It's a phrase we're all familiar with. But considering the state of some organizations' service operations, it may leave customers wondering if those firms actually do anything with the information they're gathering through those recordings.
AAA Washington, for one, is taking action on that insight to better serve its more than 900,000 members while improving behind-the-scenes processes without increasing costs.
The organization, which serves residents in Washington and northern Idaho, offers insurance, travel, and other member services like roadside assistance. Each of those three areas is represented by a call center, which combined handle more than 7,000 calls per day. Janet Ryan, director of call center operations for AAA Washington, saw that with the tools to recognize patterns, anomalies, and commonalities, she could identify issues negatively impacting customer service.
"Now I can see how the whole group is doing, or a specific team, or even a single agent," she said. "We're able to use those performance analytics, as well as speech analytics, to understand and validate cases where we have problems."
AAA Washington uses the technology of Verint's ULTRA suite IntelliFind speech analytics and IntelliMiner performance analytics to record every call that comes in, provide agents with real-time customer data, and trace information in the case of a dispute. The added ability improves the customer experience by giving agents access to customers' history and helps management see where performance can be improved.
"We're driving customer satisfaction now because we can look at the core areas where we're failing easier," Ryan said. "We can see why someone is on hold twice and find out if it's a training issue, a process issue, or a billing issue and figure out how to solve that problem."
Customers' hold time is shorter because of the increased agent efficiency, and they call less often about processes that have been fixed as a result of the new system. Agent performance is improving as well. Call center managers can complete double the number of agent evaluations possible before the system, and are able to do so in half the time. That translates to a 400% efficiency gain, as well as better trained, more proficient agents who deliver a higher level of service.
The analytics also make it easier for AAA Washington to examine claims in real time, which helps settle disputes faster and avoid fraudulent insurance payouts, saving the organization about $100,000 per year by improving outside billing processes. Using speech analytics, Ryan and her team were able to see that one vendor was causing more billing-related inquiries than any others. She was able to work with that company to reduce the number of calls by pointing out the issues.
The organization has seen continuous increases in customer satisfaction over the past two years because of agents' enhanced skills and improved metrics. "We measure our satisfaction on a monthly basis with members and we've been driving it up consistently," Ryan said.
Reprinted with permission from 1to1 Media. (c) 2006 Carlson Marketing Worldwide.
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